Moving Fulcrum

The growing irrelevance of Google Search

More and more I find myself using less and less of Google Search.
In fact, most of my searching basically involves doing a search of:

Twitter

Stack Overflow

Wikipedia

Yelp

Think about it, if I wanna know:

How was the finale of Breaking Bad?

Is there a line at the nearby Apple Store for iPhone 5s?

Are people able to finally login to GTA Online?

Twitter is the tool I would use for the above, not Google.

Similarly, if I want to know if there is a pizza place open at 3 am, I would use Yelp, not Google.

And frankly, that is what most of my searches look like nowdays. They usually concern stuff around me, instead of web pages of information. Even if I am looking for information that is on a webpage, it is almost always in either Stack Overflow or Wikipedia.

Google excels at searching for the long tail of information. That was true a few years ago, when an individual’s opinion could only be expressed on either a blog post or a forum post, which google could index/rank like nobody’s business.

But in a world with Twitter, and the silos of information that are now sites like Stack Overflow and Wikipedia, Google Search is becoming more and more irrelevant.

(I specifically am referring to Google Search in this post and not Google as a whole.)